A party who agrees to enter into a transaction may need to define a number of different terms associated with the transaction. For example, the party may want to define when and how periodic payments will be made, the ways in which the amount of various payments will be calculated, and/or how various events will be handled during the transaction's lifecycle (e.g., when the other party want to cancel the transaction). By accurately defining the terms of the transaction, various parties can understand and reach an agreement as to how the transaction will be performed.
To facilitate the definition of such a transaction, a party may use a pre-defined type of transaction agreement, such as one associated with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISA) master agreement or other types of agreement structures. In some cases, a financial tool-kit such as the ones available from LEXIFI SAS of France may be used to help describe the transaction. Similarly, the Financial Products Markup Language (FPML), which is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard for over-the-counter trading among financial instructions, may be used to implement pre-defined contract terms, parties, and/or payments associated with a transaction.
Different types of transactions, however, will be associated with different types of terms and conditions. Thus, a new type of transaction might require that an existing agreement modeling language be modified to support a new type of term in order to fully and accurately describe the transaction. By way of example, a new FPML term might need to be manually created in order to describe a new type of transaction. As a result, the automation of a transaction definition system may be limited (e.g., because a user needs to manually create a new term to describe a new type of transaction). Moreover, manually creating new terms can increase the cost and time required to define a new transaction—especially when a complex transaction is being created. In addition, errors may occur when a new term is created (e.g., a new term might have an unintended consequence under certain conditions) and such errors can be difficult to discover and resolve.